SUMMIT POUND

On this canal the money that matters is water.

SUMMIT POUND is a free canal company game for your browser. You run the summit pound, the highest stretch of a canal, with a flight of locks going down at each end. Every boat that crosses the summit takes 12 ML of water down the locks, whatever it carries and whatever it pays. Run the summit dry and the canal shuts.

How it plays

• One decision runs the company: a brass reserve line on the summit gauge. Above it every boat passes, in the order it came. Below it only the cargoes you mark as priority pass. A packet boat pays £24 in tolls for the same lockful a coal boat pays £3 for.
• The seasons decide what water is worth. Spring is wet, summer is dry, autumn is fair and winter is the wettest, and in summer every canal runs short, so a passage pays over three times the usual toll. Sell the water now, or hold the line high through the wet months and sell the summit in summer.
• If the summit falls under the red dead line the canal shuts until it refills past a re-open line. Every waiting boat gives up, and a quarter of that trade goes to the turnpike road for good.
• Build plant as the years open it: reservoirs in the hills that store the rain, dredging that deepens the summit, wharves that bring more boats, side ponds that save a fifth of every lockful, pumping engines that burn coal in the dry months to lift water back up, and a duplicate flight whose twin chambers fill each other. Everything you build appears on the canal map, and every piece of it has an upkeep.
• From year 6 you can buy the sea cut, a cut through to the sea and the end of the company's story. A well run company gets there in five or six game years, under ten minutes at normal speed. After the cut you can keep running the canal.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything: drag the brass line, tap a cargo card to make it priority, tap a plant plate to build. On a keyboard: Up and Down move the line, 1 to 4 set priority, Q W E R T Y build, S orders the sea cut (press it twice to confirm), Space or P pauses, + and - change the speed (1x, 3x, 8x), H shows how to play, M turns the sound off and on, and Escape opens the company office. Landscape screens get the wide layout and upright phones a tall one.

The company saves every season, whenever you build and when you leave the page. CONTINUE on the title picks it up.

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Paid, from the same studio

• Verdant 18, Victorian Industrial ($12.99): the tileset this game's canal, coping, quay and cargo are built from, with a works yard and firebrick for your own maps.
• Verdant 01, Overworld ($4.99): the grass, trees and lakes of these hills, as a 16x16 overworld tileset.
• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code and the text were written with AI assistance. The land, the canal, the reservoirs and the quay are tiles from our own Verdant 01 and Verdant 18 packs, made by our own procedural tile code, itself AI-written; the boats, the gauge, rain, steam, the engine houses and every screen are drawn by the game's own code; the cover illustration on this page was made with an image model. The music and every sound are synthesised in your browser by the game's own code, with no generative audio model and no samples. Typefaces: IM Fell English SC and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.